Henry D. Thoreau - American Writers 90 : University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers No. 90 [1 ed.] 9780816651832, 9780816605620

Citation preview

PAMPHLETS ON AMERICAN WRITERS • NUMBER 9O

Henry D. Thoreau

BY LEGIST EDEL

UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS • MINNEAPOLIS

® Copyright 1970 by Leon Edel ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Printed in the United States of America at the Lund Press, Minneapolis

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 76-629876

PUBLISHED IN GREAT BRITAIN, INDIA, AND PAKISTAN BY THE OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, LONDON, BOMBAY, AND KARACHI, AND IN CANADA BY THE COPP CLARK PUBLISHING CO. LIMITED, TORONTO

HENRY D. THOREAU

LEON EDEL, biographer and critic, is the Henry James Professor of English and American Letters at New York University. He has written and edited more than thirty volumes, the most important being The Life of Henry James, The Modern Psychological Novel, and Literary Biography.

Henry D. Thoreau oFTHEcreativespiritsthatflourishedinConcord,Massachusetts, during the middle of the nineteenth century, it might be said that Hawthorne loved men but felt estranged from them, Emerson loved ideas even more than men, and Thoreau loved himself. Less of an artist than Hawthorne, less of a thinker than Emerson, Thoreau made of his life a sylvan legend, that of man alone, in communion with nature. He was a strange presence in American letters — we have so few of them — an eccentric. The English tend to tolerate their eccentrics to the enrichment of their national life. In America, where democracy and conformity are often confused, the nonconforming Thoreau was frowned upon, and for good reason. He had a disagreeable and often bellicose nature. He lacked geniality. And then he had once set fire to the Concord woods — a curious episode, too lightly dismissed in the Thoreau biographies. He was, in the fullest sense of the word, a "curmudgeon," and literary history has never sufficiently studied the difficulties his neighbors had in adjusting themselves to certain of his childish ways. But in other ways he was a man of genius — even if it was a "crooked genius" as he himself acknowledged. A memorable picture has been left by Hawthorne's daughter of the three famous men of Concord skating one winter's afternoon on the river. Hawthorne, wrapped in his cloak, "moved like a selfimpelled Greek statue, stately and grave," as one might expect of the future author of The Marble Faun. Emerson, stoop-shouldered, "evidently too weary to hold himself erect," pitched forward, "half lying on the air." Thoreau, genuinely skillful on his skates, performed "dithyrambic dances and Bacchic leaps," enchanted with 5

LEON EDEL

himself. Their manner of skating was in accord with their personalities and temperaments. Behind a mask of self-exaltation Thoreau performed as before a mirror — and first of all for his own edification. He was a fragile Narcissus embodied in a homely New Englander. His life was brief. He was born in 1817, in Concord; he lived in Concord, and he died in Concord in 1862 shortly after the guns had spoken at Fort Sumter. A child of the romantic era, he tried a number of times to venture forth into the world. He went to Maine, to Staten Island, to Cape Cod, and ultimately to Minnesota, in search of health, but he always circled back to the Thoreau family house in Concord and to the presence of a domineering and loquacious mother. No other man with such wide-ranging thoughts and a soaring mind —it reached to ancient Greece, to the Ganges, to the deepest roots of England and the Continent — bound himself to so small a strip of ground. "He was worse than provincial," the cosmopolitan Henry James remarked, "he was parochial." All of Thoreau's writings represent a continuous and carefully documented projection of the self. Walden announces itself autobiography — "I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well." The book is an idealized and romantic account of Thoreau's sojourn in the woods. Even its beautiful digressions are a series of masks. In both of his works, Walden and A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, as in his miscellaneous essays, we find an ideal self rather than the Thoreau Concord knew. The artist in Thoreau improved on nature in the interest of defending himself against some of nature's more painful truths. However, the facts of literary history offer us sufficient clues to the study of the character and personality of the child christened David Henry Thoreau. (Later he chose to be called Henry David — a slight rearrangement, perhaps in the interest of 6

Henry D. Thoreau euphony, yet symptom of the many rearrangements of the Thoreau self.) It may be a small matter, but Thoreau, who abjured vanities and called on men to simplify their lives, listed among the meager belongings he took to Walden Pond a three-by-three-inch mirror — he who had all of Walden in which to look at himself. He kept, moreover, a mirror for his soul as well, in the most consistently written and religiously preserved journal of American letters. His life was indeed a life of constant self-contemplation and self-observation. Walden was "my own sun and moon and stars, and a little world to myself." If he looked often into his little mirror and the mirror of the Pond, he listened also, as Narcissus did, to the nymph Echo. He found the echoes of his own voice — so he said — almost the only "kindred voices" that he heard. His inner quest, which he often made eloquent, was to be both Spartan and Athenian. Men can be one or the other at different times. Thoreau tried to be both at once, and he worked hard to reconcile these irreconcilables. He was the sort of man who needs the constant vision of his countenance to assure himself that he is not dissolving altogether into the elements. The mirror he brought to his hut, the hut itself which he purchased from a shanty dweller and rebuilt, the manner in which he extolled Concord even while scolding it, reveal a different Thoreau from the self-portrait, and from the Thoreau image sentimentalized by generations of nature lovers who have never read him. He shrugged his shoulders at the tools of society, but used them constantly. He had enormous practical gifts; he could use his hands, knew much of the lore of nature, had considerable Yankee shrewdness and what we term colloquially "know-how." But in his moments of insight he recognized, as he did in one of his poems, that he was "a parcel of vain strivings tied/ By a chance bond together,/ Dangling this way and that." What attracts our attention in particular is not so much the "vain strivings," 7

LEON EDEL

which might be attributed to many men, but the poet's imagining himself to be loosely strung together. Poetry, Thoreau once said, "is a piece of very private history, which unostentatiously lets us into the secret of a man's life." Behind the mask of nature lover, philosopher, man of craft and lore, Thoreau struggled to keep the parcel of himself from becoming unwrapped and scattered. He speaks in the same poem of having "no root in the land," and of drinking up his own "juices." His friends observed this in him; his was an inner rage that consumes. Beneath his outward euphoria lay always a deep melancholy. Perhaps Thoreau's best known remark, made in Walden, was that "the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." This is often quoted with the assumption that Thoreau himself was never desperate: that he at least achieved a tranquil and philosophic existence. The Concord farmers, however, who saw Thoreau's zeal and compulsions — the tenacities of this self-appointed "inspector of snow storms and rain storms" — would have regarded his assiduous journal-keeping as a life of greater desperation than their own rude lives of daily work. There is in all of Thoreau's writings an enforced calm; strange tensions run below the surface, deep obsessions. He is so preoccupied with self-assertion as to suggest that this was a profound necessity rather than an experience of serenity. His struggle for identity gave him great powers of concentration and diligence. He was not a born writer, but he taught himself by imitation to carpenter solid verbal structures and give them rhythm and proportion. He went to school to Emerson, to Carlyle, to the Greeks, to the philosophers of India. He was first and foremost a reader of books — and only after them of nature. He read like a bee clinging to a flower, for all that he could extract from the printed page. He wrote poems, many of them banal; yet he poured a great deal of poetry into the more relaxed passages of his prose. This prose is seldom spontaneous; behind its emulation of the measure 8

Henry D. Thoreau and moderation of the ancients one feels strain and subterranean violence. The violence often is converted into contempt and condescension for Thoreau's neighbors and the hardworking farmers of Concord. Two acts established Thoreau's fame and his myth. The first was his building of a comfortable, heated, plastered cabin beside Waiden Pond; this he did out of a "prefabricated" hut purchased for a few dollars from an impecunious shanty dweller. He set it well within the range of the railroad and of his f ellowmen and pretended that he lived self-sufficiently in the wilderness. Here he dwelt for about two years. He himself tallied exactly twenty-six months, but he did not deduct the month he lived under his mother's roof while waiting for the plaster to dry; nor the fortnight of a trip to the Maine woods. During his stay at Walden he worked hard, hoeing his beans and determining the rude economy possible to him in simplifying his life. That he had access to his mother's cookie jar in town and enjoyed sundry dinners elsewhere, as we shall see, made no difference to his calculations. In his cabin he wrote A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers; he extolled solitude and nature and spoke of "the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor." How he lived as America's first conscientious public "dropout" he would describe later in the memorable Walden, originally subtitled "Life in the Woods." The second source of his fame and myth was his act of "civil disobedience." He gave us that valuable formulation of the privilege of dissent. He refused to pay his poll tax and went to jail — for one night. Someone else paid it — "interfered" said Thoreau — and the jailer ousted him from his cell. In truth, Thoreau did not fancy martyrdom. He was always willing to allow others — society — to do for him what he would not do himself. He was willing to use existing tools so long as these enabled him to pursue his private course and in his own distinctive way. "I quietly declare war with 9

LEON EDEL

the State, after my fashion," he wrote in his celebrated essay and his own fashion seems to have been partly explained when he added, "I will still make what use and get what advantage of her I can, as is usual in such cases." The man of high principle here shed his principles. And he behaved also as if no other individuals existed in society. Whitman discerned in him "a morbid dislike of humanity." From this it may be seen that the image of Thoreau which has reached us is larger than the figure Thoreau's contemporaries knew. His myth of a lonely life in the woods, of man against society, has provided modern men with thoughts about their place in a treeimpoverished world, whose air is polluted — a world alienated from nature. Thoreau gave permanent form to the dream of men in great anonymous urban communities who want to "get away from it all." He also influenced individuals like Tolstoi and Gandhi who had in them a similar rage of reform; these men, however, possessed a larger sense of their f ellowmen than did Thoreau. In a society of diminishing liberties, Thoreau freed himself personally of some of society's tyrannies without offering any ultimate solution for the problems he so fervently discussed. Kamo-No Chomei, the Japanese sage, in his Hojoki, written almost seven centuries before Walden, described his life in a ten-foot-square hut; but he lived in it for thirty years and, in the timeless ways of the East, found his answers within himself. Thoreau, who read the books of the East — though he could hardly have known those of a Japan as yet unopened to the West —did not regard his Walden cabin as a permanent home. He left it as abruptly as he built it, saying he had gone there only "to transact some private business." The Hojoki describes a way of life, Walden represented largely a gesture. By the standards of his fellow citizens in Concord Thoreau seemed lazy and shiftless. They judged him with severity, but also with indulgence, for they knew his talents. He was a skillful arti10

Henry D. Thoreau san, a fine surveyor, an active amateur naturalist; and he was highly inventive. His resourcefulness extricated his parents from poverty. But he ran away from his accomplishments in a kind of morbid fear they might enslave him. Emerson, in his truth-seeking eulogy at Thoreau's grave, said that he counted it a fault in him that he had no ambition. And he went on to say that "wanting this, instead of engineering for all America, he was the captain of a huckleberry party." Emerson added, in his characteristic fashion, "Pounding beans is good to the end of pounding empires one of these days; but if, at the end of years it is still only beans!" The observation was severe. Emerson expected perhaps too much from his temperamental disciple. Thoreau wanted to be a writer rather than an empire builder. Nevertheless Emerson discerned in Thoreau's daily life — despite its egocentric form — a drive to power, and one can understand the philosopher's disappointment. His allusion to the huckleberry party has some significance. Thoreau, when very young, had been taken by his mother to Fair Haven Hill, where the huckleberries were abundant; and she took him also at a tender age to the shores of Walden Pond. Small wonder that he clung to "the fabulous landscape of my infant dreams." These were memorable little journeys and Thoreau's personal geography became identified with the powerful, talkative parent who loomed large in all the years of his life. His father counted for much less; he is described as a "mousey" man, ineffectual in business, who apparently abdicated early to the houseful of women — his wife, her sisters, his daughters — a nest of femininity in which his younger son was cradled. We can understand therefore why huckleberry picking on Fair Haven Hill, to which he led the children of the town like some latter-day Pied Piper, was one of Thoreau's fondest pastimes. It was a repeated return to a landscape glamorized for him long before by his mother's love and attention. Walden and Fair Haven became symbolic transformations in the ii

LEON EDEL

innermost world of Thoreau of the one great attachment of his life. The umbilical cord might be said to have never been cut. Nature, he once remarked, "is my mother at the same time that she is my sister. I cannot imagine a woman no older than I." It is recorded that when he was about to graduate from Harvard he asked his mother what career he might follow. She replied: "You can buckle on your knapsack and roam abroad to seek your fortune." In early America, with the frontier near at hand, the remark seems natural enough. Yet Thoreau had a sudden fit of weeping. He read his mother's remark as if she were sending him away from her. His older sister came to his rescue. "No, Henry, you shall not go, you shall stay at home and live with us." Sometime later he said, "Methinks I should be content to sit at the back door in Concord, under the poplar tree henceforth, forever." And this was, in effect, what he did — for life. In his writings he would make a virtue of this embeddedness. He read the great legends and adventures of man into Concord, as James Joyce later read the Odyssey into Dublin. One could, with the aid of books, possess an imaginary world in a cabin by a New England pond. "My cottage becomes the universe," said the Japanese Chomei. This quality of dependence, this clinging to his mother, and all that represented her, Concord, Fair Haven, Walden, caused him to seek — in his quest for a place in the world — models he could emulate, and his first and natural choice fell on his elder brother, John. But the brother died young of tetanus. Thoreau, it is recorded, promptly developed the same symptoms, as if he too had to die. Of the two sons, Henry David Thoreau had been designated, by family decision, to go to a university, although there had been some thought at first of making him a carpenter. Money was found and he went to Harvard. Here he acquired the habit of reading; and here he heard Emerson speak. It was a momentous experience to find so much inspiration in a fellow townsman. Their friend12

Henry D. Thoreau ship was to be at the very center of Thoreau's life, for his pliant nature imitated Emerson as he had imitated his brother. Lowell, visiting Concord in 1838, a year after Thoreau's graduation, wrote, "I met Thoreau last night and it is exquisitely amusing to see how he imitates Emerson's tone and manner. With my eyes shut, I shouldn't know them apart." And seventeen years later, F. B. Sanborn, one of Thoreau's biographers, still could notice that "in his tones and gestures he seemed to me to imitate Emerson." Thoreau's prose would always be filled with echoes of Emerson and he adopted certain essential qualities of his style while being addicted at the same time — as Emerson was not — to exaggeration and paradox. For a while, after graduation, he taught school, but early abandoned this. He then sought the lecture platform, also in imitation of Emerson. From 1841 to 1843 he lived in the Emerson household as a general handyman. He attached himself to Mrs. Emerson; she must be seen as still another in the line of female figures — the sisters, aunts, mother — who had surrounded him from his earliest years. Emerson, in his qualified eulogy, described his handyman's aptitudes: "his senses were acute, his frame well-knit and hardy, his hands skillful in the use of tools." He worked neatly and with precision; he took care of the garden, instructed Emerson in husbandry — he brought the lore of the woods to the author of Nature. And his mentor, on his side, encouraged him to write, to keep a journal, to contribute to the Dial where Thoreau helped with editorial chores. Thus he came to know the transcendentalists. No literary or social historian has yet written the full story of the years of Emerson and Thoreau in Concord although a large literature exists on the subject. We have a charming evocation in Van Wyck Brooks's The Flowering of New England: but the painting is too much in the tones of the subjects themselves and 13

LEON EDEL

while the book abounds in color and local substance it does not convey to us the limitations of this community in which so many highminded people came and went. It is necessary to read ourselves back into a sparse and hardworking society possessed of a parochial yet strong sense of civic responsibility and Christian duty. At one end of the town there lived for some years an imaginative artist in the Old Manse, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and at the other, with rows of elms between, Mr. Emerson daily communicated his thoughts to his journal, wrote his lectures, and walked in his orchard. There was a great scratching of pens in various parts of the town. Thoreau kept his journal; the Alcotts, father and daughter — that is, Bronson Alcott and Louisa May— wrote regularly in their diaries; William Ellery Channing, the poet, and F. B. Sanborn, the teacher, kept records and later wrote the first biographies of Thoreau. Margaret Fuller came and went. There were other salty characters, not least the much-described Mary Moody Emerson, who used her shroud as a garment of daily wear; and the scholarly Mrs. Ripley, Emerson's long-time friend. On another social scale we must mention Mrs. Thoreau, one of the town's socially ambitious women who was described as having a "regal" presence. The place had some two thousand inhabitants counting farmers beyond the town's radius; and in an age of steadfast labor and isolation from the wider world (it took two hours by coach to cover the fourteen miles to Boston) there was sufficient time and energy to expend on the reforms dear to the heart of New England. Concord had its active Temperance Society; and the Middlesex Anti-Slavery Society dedicated itself unremittingly to the abolitionist cause. Thoreau himself was host to runaways and we know of his conducting one slave to a contact point on the underground railway to Canada. There was also the Concord Social Library, and town meetings were regularly held. The town bell summoned citizens and literary history tells us that the bell ringer refused to do his job when Thoreau called a meeting 14

Henry D. Thoreau on behalf of John Brown; Thoreau on this occasion rang the bell himself. We must remind ourselves of these multiple forces at work in this environment: the liberal causes were espoused passionately in a life of solid if rough creature comfort. We can measure the scale of life by visiting the Old Manse, and walking through its low-ceilinged rooms, and seeing the straight-backed chairs, the black horsehair seats, the frugal adornments, and all that is implied when we speak of plain living and high thinking. In such a society, with men of vigorous talent like Hawthorne and Emerson, and idiosyncratic individuals like Thoreau and Channing, thoughts tended to run to transcendental things. The long cold winters, with the deep snows of that era, were conducive to reading and to writing. Henry James, the novelist, who knew the later Concord, would characterize the town and environs as a kind of "American Weimar." Concord had had, long before, its single moment of history: the shot heard round the world had been fired within hearing and sight of the Old Manse and the battle between the farmers and the British had been watched by the Reverend Mr. Ripley from its windows. Touched thus by primary history, the town's very name gave a lofty tone to the place; and the tones of its discourse would echo through later decades and reflect the civilized American mind in close communion with nature and its own sense of secular and Divine order. It might be said that Thoreau was a born transcendentalist and that Emerson's Nature might have been written for him. Going beyond affirmation of a romantic idealism, a faith in the self, in one's feelings and senses as distinct from the prescribing faiths, Emerson urged men to put trust in their "involuntary perceptions"—a highly modern view: today we would say that he urged men to try to be more in tune with their unconscious promptings. Octavius B. Frothingham, the historian of transcendentalism, spoke of the movement as "a wave of sentiment"; and Emerson's biographer, J. '5

LEON EDEL

E. Cabot, phrased this more vividly when he said it was a stirring "of Puritan thought with a hint of smothered fires." Emerson wrote: "Build your own world. As fast as you conform your life to the pure idea in your mind, that will unfold its grand proportions." No deeper chord in Thoreau could have been touched. Ever after he studied the grandeur of the Self; for Emerson's teaching endowed human consciousness with supremacy in life and severed the bonds that tied man's will to religious dictates. V. L. Parrington would characterize this more harshly as "a mystical egocentric universe wherein the children of God might luxuriate in their divinity." Within these ideas one could find echoes of Rousseau, of Coleridge, of Goethe. The full tide of European romanticism had reached the western shores of the Atlantic. Cabot remarks that Emerson, in Nature, did not preach reliance on intuition as a selfconceit or "an exaggerated regard for one's own spiritual experiences," but to some extent this was the form of Thoreau's response. He had come upon a philosophy that would suffice for a lifetime. He was "Emerson's moral man made flesh." He could live for the universe as for Concord; he could sing the sense of the infinite in his own being. "I am a poet, a mystic and a transcendentalist," Thoreau announced. "I came into this world not chiefly to make this a good place to live in, but to live in it, be it good or bad." Nevertheless he preached; and what he preached was "self-improvement." Cabot further tells us that "there was much talk in those days of spontaneity — the right and duty of acting oneself out, and following one's genius, whithersoever it might lead." This Thoreau did. There were complaints that transcendentalism unfitted the young men for business and the young women for society — "without making them fit for anything else." The idealism nevertheless was genuine. Emerson's thoughts were wide and humane, but as often happens, not everyone accurately interpreted the inspired message. 16

Henry D. Thoreau No one has ever examined the "interpersonal" relations between Emerson and his disciples and the manner in which this largeminded man attracted eccentricity to himself — as exemplified notably in Alcott, Thoreau, and Charming. One wonders what needs these acolytes fulfilled in Emerson's life and what sense of power he derived from their pronounced discipleship. We may speculate, however, that there came a moment when Emerson asked himself whether he had acquired a handyman for life. Thoreau embedded himself in his household as completely as in his maternal home; indeed Emerson may have represented for Thoreau both his brother and his mother, in his example and his acceptance. The sage of Concord was alert enough not to accept passively so much ambivalence. His eulogy pronounced over Thoreau's grave is filled with significant asperities, some perhaps unintended. It is also frankly critical, as some of Emerson's journal entries also show. He sought to define Thoreau for himself, writing that the younger man's conversation consisted of "a continual twining of the present moment into a sentence and offering it to me." Thoreau's behavior in this household was as quixotic as when he lived at home. "Why is he never frank?" Emerson asked himself once. And he added, "I have no social pleasure with Henry, though more than once the best conversation." At the end of two years, Emerson urged the young man to launch himself in the world of letters. He obtained employment for him in New York, as tutor to the children of a relative on Staten Island. His motive was generous; he believed that Thoreau, as a poet and a sentient being, would contribute to the literature of the new America. But he was also tactfully elbowing the omnipresent handyman out of his household. Thoreau went to New York. That he found the life in the city less congenial than the familiar woods and fields of Concord is understandable. Given his difficulties in relating to his human —as distinct from animal — environment, he could discover no comfortI?

LEON EDEL

able friends in an urban community, even though New York in the early i84o's swarmed with writers and publishers, and Thoreau had helpful letters of introduction. The elder Henry James, whom Thoreau went to see with a letter from Emerson, found him to be "the most child-like, unconscious and unblushing egotist it has ever been my fortune to encounter in the ranks of mankind." The father of the future novelist saw in Thoreau "a sheer and mountainous inward self-esteem." He received him, however, with warmth and friendliness. Thoreau found helpful individuals in Manhattan, but he remained homesick, moody, despondent. Within a matter of months he returned from his exile, but not to the Emerson household. He went back to his family, back to his own room, his books, his papers, his botanical specimens. Shortly after this he built his hut beside Walden. He would re-enter the Emerson household two years later, but only for a well-defined term, to take care of the place while Emerson lectured abroad. The history of this friendship was one of gradual estrangement. "His virtues," Emerson said, "sometimes ran into extremes." Literary history has never asked itself why Henry David Thoreau, aged twenty-eight, in the midsummer of 1845 — on Independence Day— moved into the Walden cabin and embarked on what he called his "experiment" in simplifying the acts of life. It has accepted Thoreau's own explanation for this limited withdrawal from his family home. He wished, he said, to test the things by which society around him lived. He struck for a kind of personal freedom. The men in Concord, the neighboring farmers, led in his view unsimple lives. They were mortgaged to their encumbered properties and their daily labor. Thoreau would practice a rude economy and avoid enslavement: he would free himself for higher things, mainly reading and writing, and his observation of nature. The historical facts suggest, however, that Thoreau was led to his act by a crisis 18

Henry D. Thoreau for which a cabin in the woods offered a radical solution. His life with the Emersons had been an extension of his life at home; he had left home, but had gone only as far as the home of a neighbor. He had then attempted to leave Concord and found not only that he was unable to launch himself in the wider world but that life without Concord was impossible to him. Returned from Staten Island, under the family roof, he at first took up his father's trade of pencil making. With his usual resourcefulness, he at this time studied the composition of the graphite in German pencils; he refined the materials used by his father and this led to an improved pencil and ultimately placed the Thoreaus in a position to sell graphite wholesale. Henry remained, however, at loose ends. He had no intention of pursuing the family business; and he seemed to have nowhere to go. At this time there occurred a small incident which seemed to shake him to his very roots. The woodsman and naturalist accidentally set fire to the fields and woods of Concord while cooking a catch of fish on the shore of Fair Haven Bay where he had gone with a friend. He summoned help after a two-mile dash through the woods; and returning he found a half-mile of flame before him. While help was coming, Thoreau climbed the highest rock of Fair Haven Cliff. "It was a glorious spectacle," he later wrote in his journal, "and I was the only one there to enjoy it." When sufficient help arrived, Thoreau descended from his perch and joined in the fire fighting. "The fire, we understand," said the Concord newspaper, "was communicated to the woods through the thoughtlessness of two of our citizens, who kindled it in a pine stump, near the Pond, for the purpose of making a chowder. As every thing around them was as combustible almost as a fire-ship, the flames spread with rapidity, and hours elapsed before it could be subdued." The newspaper spoke of the "sheer carelessness" of those who had started the fire. The whole town knew who these individuals were. 19

LEON EDEL

If this occurrence had in it an acting out of Thoreau's disdain for his fellowmen in the community, the flames that destroyed three hundred acres of woodland also expressed Thoreau's inner rage and his malaise. To treat the fire as a mere accident, as have most of those who have described it, is to overlook the fact that of all men in Concord Thoreau was the one who best knew that fires may not be lit out-of-doors without serious hazard. There was, however, a singular streak of blindness to certain details in Thoreau — he who prided himself on his practical knowledge and could be, when he was interested, all alertness and observation. Lowell spoke of this some years later when he wrote that "till he built his Walden shanty he did not know that the hickory grew in Concord. Till he went to Maine, he had never seen phosphorescent wood, a phenomenon familiar to most country boys. At forty he speaks of the seeding of the pine as a new discovery, though one should have thought that its gold dust of blowing pollen might have earlier drawn his eye. Neither his attention nor his genius was of the spontaneous kind." And in our time Joseph Wood Krutch has remarked that "reading the Journal, it is almost disconcerting to discover that at thirty-four he was not sure of the identity of the common thalictrum of the fields and that a year later he had to have help in naming a Luna moth!" The failure in alertness which led to the fire was but one of various such failures, those of a man in whom reverie could pre-empt immediate reality. The fire permanently established Thoreau in the minds of his fellows at Concord as a "woods-burner." The town could shrug its shoulders at his eccentricities. It could not, however, forgive so strange and serious a lapse which threatened life and its homes. Thus less than a year before the retreat to Walden, Thoreau's reputation in Concord reached its lowest point. No one accused him of "sloth," for it was known how well he could work when he wanted to. The fire, however, caused some to speak of him as a 20

Henry D. Thoreau "damned rascal." His journal of the time tells us nothing. Certain later entries show nevertheless that the incident rankled: he was enraged by its consequences: "Who are these men who are said to be the owners of these woods, and how am I related to them? I have set fire to the forest, but I have done no wrong therein, and now it is as if the lightning had done it. These flames are but consuming their natural food." This was written six years after the event. And he also wrote, "it has never troubled me from that day to this more than if the lightning had done it. The trivial fishing was all that disturbed me and disturbs me still." Only a man deeply troubled would write in this way so long afterward and deceive himself that he wasn't troubled. "I at once ceased to regard the owners and my fault — if fault there was in the matter — and attended to the phenomenon before me, determined to make the most of it. To be sure I felt a little ashamed when I reflected on what a trivial occasion this had happened, that at the time I was no better employed than my townsmen." Thoreau's decision to move to Walden Pond seems to have been, on one level, a way of withdrawing from a town he experienced as hostile to him while at the same time remaining very close to it; a way also of asserting himself as an active "employed" man by embracing the career of writer and philosopher; an act of defiance which would demonstrate that his was a better way of life than that practiced by his fellows. Deeper still may have been the petulance of the child saying, in effect, to the town and to Emerson "see how homeless I am, you have forced me to live in a shanty away from all of you." He would arouse pity; he would also arouse interest. Some such jumble of motives lay behind his complex decision to give an impression of "hermiting" while not being a hermit. The epigraph he chose for Walden directly addresses the townspeople. It is a quotation from the book itself: "I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, stand21

LEON EDEL

ing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up." On a subjective level, Walden reflects Thoreau's dejection: in the depths of the epigraph one hears the cry of a man who must vent his rage — and be heard by the entire town! That he was full of spleen during the spring of 1845 just before he built his cabin may be discerned in a letter written to him from New York by the younger William Ellery Charming. Charming seems to have provided the impulse for Thoreau's principal act: "I see nothing for you in this earth but that field which I once christened 'Briars'; go out upon that, build yourself a hut, and there begin the grand process of devouring yourself alive. I see no alternative, no other hope for you. Eat yourself up; you will eat nobody else, nor anything else." There is a fund of psychological truth in Channing's answer to Thoreau's rage. Thoreau had long been devouring himself; he had said as much in the poem already quoted, "here I bloom for a short hour unseen,/ Drinking my juices up." Whatever the deeper motivation, Thoreau's conscious feelings on his taking up his Walden residence are clearly expressed in his book: "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion." "Briars" consisted of a dozen acres beside Walden. The land be.

22

Henry D. Thoreau longed to Emerson. With his friend's permission, Thoreau began in March 1845, after receiving Channing's letter, to clear a spot and plan his cabin. Thus was inaugurated what would become the great Thoreauvian myth; yet it was in its own time little more than a rural comedy. Concord's idlest citizen, the woods-burning "rascal," a year after making himself notorious, builds himself a small home on the town's outskirts. He will be a hermit. But he walks to town almost daily; he chats with the townsfolk; he joins the idlers around the grocery stove; he visits his home. He dines in the homes of his friends. The diary of Mrs. J. T. Fields tells us much when it records Thoreau's filial piety. Thoreau was "an excellent son," she noted, "and even when living in his retirement at Walden Pond, would come home every day." At the same time he is thinking of a chapter in his book called "Where I Lived and What I Lived For." Literary criticism, if it wished to treat Walden (1854) as a work of the imagination, might say that every poet lives in fancy rather than in fact. But literary history, unlike literary criticism, is in bondage to truth, and the truth is that Thoreau lived one kind of life and transformed it in his work into another — and then scolded his fellows for not following his ideals. Like his mother, who often put on grand airs in the town, Chanticleer crowed out of a world of make-believe. His first sentence in Walden announces: "When I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts, and earned my living by the labor of my hands only." History records, let us note in passing, that he did not write the bulk of these pages in the cabin; he took several years to complete the book, and what he wrote in the hut was A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers — Walden was written largely in the family home; moreover much material was incorporated into it which belonged to other years than those of his Walden resi23

LEON EDEL

dence. He ends his first paragraph by saying "at present I am a sojourner in civilized life again." The words imply that he had been outside civilization when he lived in his cabin. Let us look at Thoreau's sojourn beyond "civilized life" as it is documented by his latest and most careful biographer, Walter Harding. "It was not a lonely spot. The well-traveled Concord-Lincoln road was within sight across the field. The Fitchburg Railroad steamed regularly past the opposite end of the pond. Concord village was less than two miles away, and the Texas house [the Thoreau family house] was less than that along the railroad rightof-way. . . . Ellery Channing . . . visited the cabin often . . . It is true that his mother and sisters made a special trip out to the pond every Saturday, carrying with them each time some delicacy of cookery which he gladly accepted. And it is equally true that he raided the family cookie jar on his frequent [my italics] visits home. . . . The Emersons, too, frequently invited him to dinner as did the Alcotts and the Hosmers. They had all done so before he went to Walden Pond and continued the custom after he left. Rumor had it that every time Mrs. Emerson rang her dinner bell, Thoreau came bounding through the woods and over the fences to be first in line." Thoreau's biographer points out that it was doubtful whether he could hear the dinner bell at such a distance, but the joke can be taken as symptomatic of something the town knew — that at Walden Thoreau's ear was cocked to the sounds of Concord: that he led neither the solitary nor the Spartan life his book later described. His mention in Walden of his dinings out suggests that he did not allow his "experiment" to change his customary social habits. "To meet the objections of some inveterate cavillers," he writes, "I may as well state, that if I dined out occasionally, as I always had done, and I trust shall have opportunities to do again, it was frequently to the detriment of my domestic arrangements. But the dining out, 24

Henry D. Thoreau being, as I have stated, a constant element, does not in the least affect a comparative statement like this." The "comparative statement" included the sentence "It was fit that I should live on rice, mainly, who loved so well the philosophy of India." "Hardly a day went by," Harding comments, "that Thoreau did not visit the village or was not visited at the Pond. . . . Emerson was, of course, a frequent visitor at the cabin. . . . On pleasant summer days Thoreau would often join the Emerson family on a picnic or a blueberrying party. . . . The Alcotts often took their friends out to the pond to see Thoreau. . . . The children of Concord were always happy to go out to Walden Pond and Thoreau was equally happy to have them." Harding goes on: "Occasionally whole groups of Thoreau's friends came out together to the pond and swarmed into his little cabin. It became quite the fashion to hold picnics on his front doorstep. When it rained, his visitors took refuge inside. He had as many as twenty-five or thirty people inside the tiny cabin at one time. On August i, 1846, the anti-slavery women of Concord held their annual commemoration of the freeing of the West Indian slaves on his doorstep and Emerson, W. H. Channing, and Rev. Caleb Stetson spoke to the assembled group. Afterward a picnic lunch was served to all the guests." There was also a "Walden Pond Society." This "consisted of those who spent their Sunday mornings out walking around Walden Pond enjoying the beauties of nature. Thoreau was unquestionably the high priest of that sect." "Despite all the visitors," Thoreau's biographer concludes, "despite all his visits to Concord village and to his parents' home, despite his surveying and fence-building and carpentry, and despite the hours devoted to writing, it must not be forgotten that the experiment at Walden was primarily a period of solitude and of communion with nature for Thoreau." We can only ask, What kind of "experiment" was this — and what kind of "solitude"? By no defini2

5

LEON EDEL

tion of the word — and certainly not in terms of the traditional isolation and contemplation practiced by philosophers and visionaries throughout history — can Thoreau be said to have lived a solitary or even contemplative life at Walden. He "bivouacked there," wrote F. B. Sanborn, adding that he "really lived at home, where he went every day." He was thus a sojourner in civilized life; he was an observant "suburbanite"; he was simply a man who had at last acquired a room of his own, and accomplished this in a way which attracted the town's attention to himself. Young girls found excuses for knocking on his door and asking him for a drink of water; and if he pretended to be indifferent and handed them a dipper to drink from the pond, nothing could have been more satisfying. From being the town's idler, he was now the center of attention. Thoreau is distinctly ambivalent in the chapter he writes on solitude. "I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone." Yet he begins the very next chapter in Walden — which is called "Visitors" — by saying: "I think that I love society as much as most, and am ready enough to fasten myself like a bloodsucker for the time to any full-blooded man that comes in my way." By invoking his solitude at Walden, Thoreau was cultivating an illusion. He spent many hours alone, to be sure, and wandered far afield on lonely rambles: but no more alone than many an individual in his daily life. The real solitude of Thoreau's time was that of the men and women who traveled to America's heartland and who were totally cut off from society and thrown wholly upon their own resources. They faced danger; they learned the meaning of fear. Thoreau's experiment at no time posed for him any question of true aloneness, or of the terrors of the wilderness. Any momentary anxieties could be overcome by a swift walk to the homes of neighbors and kinfolk. Lewis and Clark, or 26

Henry D. Thoreau Francis Parkman, might have laid much greater claim to genuine solitude, and the entire generation that ventured forth in the covered wagons. It may be of some significance that the subtitle "Life in the Woods" included in Thoreau's first edition of Walden was later dropped, perhaps in recognition that such a life had not been his true subject. Nor is it altogether clear that Thoreau was capable of facing the solitude of the prairies. In his struggle to keep his bundle of "vain strivings" together, in his deeply embedded state, he would have found the primeval forest terrifying and he would have fled the plains, to recover the protecting and embracing arm of the society he verbally repudiated. Sherman Paul has rightly observed that Thoreau's "stance as a philosopher made it clear that his demands on life were not simple or primitive." To say this is to suggest that Walden is a book about a romanticized solitude Thoreau could not permit himself genuinely to experience. Thoreau's Concord life, in the midst of his eking out of his "scanty fare of vegetables" with fish; his curious account books of his frugality and economy; his proclamation of a style of life he approved of intellectually — but did not truly live — make for a paradoxical book. What are we to say of the passage in Walden in which Thoreau's fellowmen are scolded for not being as simple in their ways as he believed himself to be? The pages he devotes to John Field, a shanty dweller and fishing companion, who struggles to provide for the simplest needs of his family, are an extraordinary piece of egotism written by a selfpreoccupied and self-indulgent man. In arguing how simple life could be for Field — were he not misguided by social habits — Thoreau forgets that he speaks as a bachelor, living in a reasonably arrangeable world and squatting on Emerson's land. He closes his eyes altogether to Field's poverty. The passage is as cruel as it is sanctimonious: "I tried to help him with my experience, telling him that he was one of my nearest neighbors, and that I too, who came 27

LEON EDEL

a-fishing here, and looked like a loafer, was getting my living like himself; that I lived in a tight, light, and clean house, which hardly cost more than the annual rent of such a ruin as his commonly amounts to; and how, if he chose, he might in a month or two build himself a palace of his own; that I did not use tea, nor coffee, nor butter, nor milk, nor fresh meat, and so did not have to work to get them; again, as I did not work hard, I did not have to eat hard, and it cost me but a trifle for my food; but as he began with tea, and coffee, and butter, and milk, and beef, he had to work hard to pay for them, and when he had worked hard he had to eat hard again to repair the waste of his system." This seems to have been delivered without a thought for Field's children, who needed the milk, butter, beef — all the nourishment Thoreau had had when he was a growing child and probably was now having in the hospitable homes of Concord. Hawthorne apparently had listened to this kind of homily, for he once noted that in Thoreau's presence "one feels ashamed of having any money, or a house to live in, or so much as two coats to wear." "None of the brute creation requires more than Food and Shelter," Thoreau wrote in Walden, and when he amplified this he could add only clothing and fuel. Doubtless "brute creation" propagates without thought for the survival of the race; but what we see is that Thoreau left no place in his myth for the simple human affections. He discourses nobly on friendship and in a high intellectual way speaks of the nourishment men may derive from the meeting of their minds. Yet of the impulse to love, this lover of nature and worshipper of the simple life writes in Walden that "nature is hard to overcome, but she must be suppressed." By this he meant specifically that man must conquer the urge of sex. Thoreau's historians have strained to provide him with a history of love. There is obscure mention in his annals of a proposal of marriage; but the story is as strange as other episodes in his life. His 28

Henry D. Thoreau poems show that he loved the young woman's younger brother; and he seems to have proposed only after his own brother was rejected by the girl. His constituted character had no room for love for anyone save the ubiquitous "I" of his journal. Walden is not a document, nor even the record of a calculated experiment. It is a work of art pretending to be a documentary. Thoreau talked as if he lived in the wilderness but he lived in the suburbs. He furnished his home with pieces retrieved from Concord attics. We have seen that he plastered and shingled the cabin when cold weather came. We know that he took his shoes to the Concord cobbler; that he baked bread using purchased rye and Indian meal; that he slept not in rough blankets but between sheets. He gave himself the creature comforts few Americans in the log cabins of the West could enjoy. James Russell Lowell, in his celebrated essay, mercilessly denounces Thoreau's pretensions. The "experiment" presupposes, he wrote, "all that complicated civilization which it theoretically abjured. He squatted on another man's land; he borrows an ax; his boards, his nails, his bricks, his mortar, his books, his lamp, his fishhooks, his plough, his hoe, all turn state's evidence against him as an accomplice in the sin of that artificial civilization which rendered it possible that such a person as Henry D. Thoreau should exist at all." But the author of Walden discovered that his whim of living in the woods caught the fancy of audiences. Men and women were willing to listen to the fiction of his rude economy as if he were Robinson Crusoe. It is perhaps to Daniel Defoe that we may turn for a significant literary predecessor. The writer who had pretended he was keeping a journal of the plague year in London, long after the plague, who could invent a story of a man confronting the loneliness of life on a desert island, may be regarded as the forefather of Thoreau's book. The narrative of Walden is a composite of Thoreau's experiences in and 29

LEON EDEL

around Concord. The little facts are so assembled as to constitute a lively fable. Thoreau blended his wide reading and his purposeful observations to the need of a thesis: and in his mind he had proved his "experiment" long before he began it. In the process of ordering, assembling, imagining, and interpreting, the artist often took possession of his data in a robust, humorous, whimsical, paradoxical, hammered style. Walden has moments of exquisite beauty when the disciplined verbal power finds a tone and a mood expressing Thoreau's deepest artistry: "This is a delicious evening, when the whole body is one sense, and imbibes delight through every pore. I go and come with a strange liberty in Nature, a part of herself. As I walk along the stony shore of the pond in my shirt-sleeves, though it is cool as well as cloudy and windy, and I see nothing special to attract me, all the elements are unusually congenial to me. The bullfrogs trump to usher in the night, and the note of the whippoorwill is borne on the rippling wind from over the water. Sympathy with the fluttering alder and poplar leaves almost takes away my breath; yet, like the lake, my serenity is rippled but not ruffled. These small waves raised by the evening wind are as remote from storm as the smooth reflecting surface. Though it is now dark, the wind still blows and roars in the wood, the waves still dash, and some creatures lull the rest with their notes. The repose is never complete. The wildest animals do not repose, but seek their prey now; the fox, and skunk, and rabbit, now roam the fields and woods without fear. They are Nature's watchmen, — links which connect the days of animated life." The lyrical absorption of the scene into the self and the communication of the senses is eloquent. The prose creates a mood of tranquillity. So too Thoreau can endow his narrative with the cadence of a child's storybook: "Sometimes I rambled to pine groves, standing like temples, or like fleets at sea, full-rigged, with wavy boughs, 30

Henry D. Thoreau and rippling with light, so soft and green and shady that the Druids would have forsaken their oaks to worship in them; or to the cedar wood beyond Flint's Pond, where the trees, covered with hoary blue berries, spiring higher and higher, are fit to stand before Valhalla, and the creeping juniper covers the ground with wreaths full of fruit; or to swamps where the usnea lichen hangs in festoons from the white-spruce trees, and toadstools, round tables of the swamp gods, cover the ground, and more beautiful fungi adorn the stumps, like butterflies or shells, vegetable winkles; where the swamp-pink and dogwood grow, the red alder-berry glows like eyes of imps, the waxwork grooves and crushes the hardest woods in its folds, and the wild-holly berries make the beholder forget his home with their beauty, and he is dazzled and tempted by nameless other wild forbidden fruits, too fair for mortal taste." Walden belongs with the literature of imaginary voyages which yet possess, within the imagined, a great reality of their own. It contains a rustic charm, a tender lyricism in the pages devoted to the seasons and to animal life around the pond and in the neighboring woods. The book is composed of eighteen essays loosely strung together. They acquire their unity in the central themes of the work. Although Thoreau's residence lasted two years he telescoped it into a single year and drew upon materials out of more distant years. He begins in the early summer, and then goes through the autumn and the winter and the coming of spring, the eternal cycle of the seasons. If anything the winter sequence is the best written and the one most deeply felt. The embedded man is never happier than when the landscape is embedded in snow and the pond frozen over to its depths. Each chapter begins with poetic descriptions in which nature and the self merge; each chapter has its hortatory passages; and one suspects that generations of readers — when they have read Thoreau at all and not simply accepted his myth — have skipped the scoldings and the rooster-crowings and listened only to 31

LEON EDEL

the poet of nature. F. O. Matthiessen long ago showed us the structure within the seeming discursiveness of Walden. Thoreau moves into his cabin after building it, and describes his manner of living; since reading is fundamental to it, his essay on this subject is placed early in the book; after that the sounds of nature and then the threnody of his fancied solitude. The life beside Walden is minutely described in the first six chapters. We then leave the cabin for the beanfield (the land was plowed with another's plow) and the nearby village. There is a long and striking passage on the railroad: Thoreau both likes and dislikes that symbol of power which has cut across the land. Then we come to his neighbors, the animal life, the pond in winter. If he records the cycles of nature and of animal life, he does not altogether record the human cycles from which he has removed himself — the fertilities of nature are scanted; the spring in which Walden ends is rather a spring of rebirth. Thoreau likes his paradoxes. He puns; he fondles placenames and the origin of words. And he is always the self-absorbed Narcissus at his pool: "A lake is the landscape's most beautiful and expressive feature. It is earth's eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature. . . . Walden is a perfect forest mirror, set round with stones as precious to my eye as if fewer or rarer. . . . It is a mirror which no stone can crack, whose quicksilver will never wear off, whose gilding Nature continually repairs." In his delight in this great natural mirror he is also the minute observer; and the pages devoted to the pond itself move from personal image to word pictures of light on water surface, underwater currents, dances of the water bugs, the poetry of the ripples, the great depths, the leaping of fish — a kind of nature ballet written in a prose closer to poetry than most of the poems Thoreau wrote. He cast, as Henry James observed, a kind of "spiritual interest" over all that he observed. 32

Henry D. Thoreau He is at his most imaginative — that is, his ear is perhaps truest to poetry —in the playful chapter in which he tells of his "brute neighbors" beginning with a sylvan dialogue between a Hermit and a Poet. One feels in the writing of these pages echoes of the playfulness of Carlyle; but in terms of posthumous influence this passage may have importance in its striking resemblance to the recurrent rhythms of James Joyce's Firmegms Wake. It was inevitable that Joyce, early in his "Anna Livia Plurabelle" section, should pun on "Concord and the Merrimake," for that chapter is compounded of river names and water imagery and associations. Thoreau's "Was that a farmer's noon horn which sounded from beyond the woods just now?" and Joyce's "Is that the Poolbeg flasher beyant, pharphar, or a fireboat coasting nyar the Kishna?" seem to have common stylistic origins and the entire Thoreauvian passage finds strong echoes —in an Irish accent —in passages in Finnegms Wake. Thoreau writes: "Hark! I hear a rustling of the leaves. Is it some ill-fed village hound yielding to the instinct of the chase? or the lost pig which is said to be in these woods, whose tracks I saw after the rain? It comes on apace; my sumachs and sweetbriers tremble." This has a singular rhythmic charm and one can find its parallel in Joyce. Did Thoreau and Joyce (who had much in common in their alienated temperaments) derive the rhythms and cadences from some common source? or did the Irish writer, in his exploration of rivers and water music, latch onto the peculiar Thoreauvian trouvaille of this chapter. In the strange world of letters in which songs sung in one country become new songs in another, the words of Thoreau by the Concord River have a powerful kinship with those of Joyce by the LifFey. The "private business" which Thoreau wished to transact at Walden included the writing of a long-planned book, a record of a journey he had made with his brother John when he was twenty33

LEON EDEL

two. John had died three years later and A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849) was both a record and a memorial. It is divided into the days of the week, where Walden would be shaped according to the changing seasons — as if Thoreau were saying that youth can count but in hours and days while maturity knows the cycles of eternity. A Week contains much that is illustrative of Thoreau's philosophy; yet criticism has rightly called it overwritten and self-conscious; it is a mixture of description and homily, of gathered facts and sensitivity, with Thoreau's own poems interlarded between passages. One might call it a mental scrapbook; only in part is it travel narrative, so that anthologists are often prompted to winnow out the contemplative digressions. "We were bid to a river party — not to be preached at," Lowell remarked. But he praised the language as having "an antique purity like wine grown colorless with age." The book contains the lore of the fisherman and nature lover, a personal sense of scene and landscape and a number of little insets culled from history, as for example, the story of an early settler, a pioneer woman who, taken prisoner by the Indians after they had killed her newborn infant, avenged herself by scalping her captors while they slept and collected a bounty for the scalps. Thoreau tells this bloody tale with historical art. But to reach such passages we wade through the tedium of private sermons set down without feeling for the book's essential unity. In A Week Thoreau is learning how to write Walden. If A Week remembers, in part, the ecstasy of youth, it is a book written with a sense of lost childhood and adolescence. A significant link between it and Walden may be found in a quotation (in A Week) from the Chinese writer Mencius (Meng-tzu): "If one loses a fowl or a dog, he knows well how to seek them again; if one loses the sentiments of his heart, he does not know how to seek them again. . . . The duties of practical philosophy consist only in 34

Henry D. Thoreau seeking after those sentiments of the heart which we have lost; that is all." It seems clear that between the writing of A Week and of Walden Thoreau came to feel that the sentiments of his heart were irrecoverable, for in Walden we read his celebrated parable which harks back to this quotation. It is set down almost irrelevantly with a remark that readers would pardon some "obscurities, for there are more secrets in my trade than in most men's." "I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtledove, and am still on their trail. Many are the travellers I have spoken concerning them, describing their tracks and what calls they answered to. I have met one or two who had heard the hound, and the tramp of the horse, and even seen the dove disappear behind a cloud, and they seemed as anxious to recover them as if they had lost them themselves." The obscurity of the parable disappears when it is placed beside the quotation from Mencius. What is more we can read a deeper secret than the loss of youth's first ecstasies. The symbols Thoreau uses represent the most faithful animals in man's life — his dog, guide, companion, devoted beyond the devotion of humans to his master, and his horse, a bay, a handsome animal, which embodies man's thrust, his drive, his animal instincts. A horse carries man and gives him a sense of support and direction. And finally the loss of the turtledove admits to a loss of love and tenderness, symbol of delicacy and affection. A man so bereft had indeed to seek comfort in cold thought. The parable speaks for an eternal quest for the ideal. It also tells us that Thoreau felt he had lost touch with the deepest part of himself — his instincts, his animal nature, with which all men must make some kind of truce. And so like the Eastern philosophers whom he read, he transcends this part of himself. He sits by a pond and meditates but only partly in serenity and humility. His thoughts often express petulance and anger, of a deeply irrational kind. Behind his mask of peace, Thoreau was not at peace with himself. No discussion of Thoreau's writings can overlook his debt to the 35

LEON EDEL

East, and particularly to India. Through Emerson he came to the Bhagavad Gita; he read the Veda and the Upanishads and in these writings, filled with permissive religiosity, and an exaltation of the quest for the self, showing the way to renunciation and contemplation, he discovered a body of belief highly congenial to his own anarchist nature. He understood the East, however, as a Westerner possessing a philosophy of doing as well as of meditation. Robert Louis Stevenson recognized this when he wrote, "It was his ambition to be an Oriental philosopher; but he was always a very Yankee sort of Oriental." Thoreau's stance was of a Buddha in Concord; that he called himself an "inspector of snow storms" in itself underlines the essential difference between him and the Eastern writers he read. They did not think of themselves as "inspectors" of anything, not even of their own state of being. Thoreau sought in them confirmation of his own feelings and solace for his own needs. His inner restlessness was too great, he was too troubled to arrive at their kind of peace. He was eclectic, empirical, bent on self-improvement; and it might suggest the difference between him and the Eastern philosophers if we remind ourselves that Chomei lived for thirty years in his hut and made of it a continuous way of life where Thoreau, after two years, "left the woods for as good a reason as I went there." He added, "Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one." The idea of having no time to spare for what he had first asserted as a transcendent way of existence, and of seeking instead a pluralistic existence — here the American distinctly parted with the Oriental. But where he was at one with them was often in his address to the immediate, in his attempt —not always successful — to see the object unadorned by subjective distortion. That he often failed we must write down to his inner disorganization. In his moments of serenity he arrived, a poetic fancy aiding, at insight; and he

36

Henry D. Thoreau sometimes told these insights in the Eastern manner as we have seen, in enigmatic parables which force realization and awaken thought. The "private business" Thoreau transacted at Walden represented one side of his mind and art; the public business he embraced thereafter has left its mark on mankind. Thoreau was that wellknown figure, a man who can accept no authority but himself and who can become, in his moments of eloquence, the voice of the multitude against abuse of authority. Such individuals often waver between Utopia and reality; in dismissing authority they offer no viable solution to man's constant need for order. That man has never achieved such order —as witness the barbaric wars of the twentieth century and the ensuing chaos —only certifies the dilemma. And because the dilemma has been constant in all history, man must reiterate in every age a need for fundamental freedom. Such a reiteration leads to action, nearly always violent, and violent even when it calls itself nonviolent. Coercion in any form, even in passive resistance, is violent. These are the ambiguities and the cruel alternatives fate has offered man, making him an eternal seeker of rationality in an ever-irrational world. Thoreau was sufficiently rational when in 1846 he came into Concord from Walden to take his shoes to the cobbler and was arrested by the town jailer for failure to pay the poll tax. He had refused to pay because he would have no truck with government and in particular a government which waged the Mexican war and condoned slavery. That the government on its side would simply collect the tax from the jailer if he in turn could not collect it from Thoreau did not concern him. This was of course a cycle of coercion, and Thoreau's action did not alter the iniquity, indeed it compounded it. Bronson Alcott earlier had acted similarly and also been freed by a tax-paying friend. Mrs. Alcott wrote that "we were spared the affliction of his absence and he the triumph of suffering 37

LEON EDEL

for his principles." Thoreau was distinctly deprived of such a triumph. But his indignation persisted. Two years later he expressed it in his lecture on "Civil Disobedience." It is his most celebrated essay. He tells the story of his night's imprisonment with considerable charm and a certain whimsicality; the story is set into his simple argument calling upon men to offer noncompliance when their conscience dictates it —what came to be called "passive resistance," Gandhi's Satyagraha. In practice it has proved to be a passive way of making revolution; that it also can lead to violence does not alter its effectiveness in certain conditions. It cannot be effective in all conditions: one knows that had humans placed themselves on roadways to stop Nazi tanks, the Nazis would have ridden over them. Thoreau's civil disobedience presupposes a high state of conscience; and it presupposes also a form of principle tolerable only in a society which has moved beyond barbarism. "The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right," Thoreau said, and implicit in this is the grandeur of great libertarians but also the violence of John Brown. "Civil Disobedience" is an unusually cogent statement for Thoreau, who was a man of sentiment rather than of profound thought and who tended often to contradict himself. It remains a remarkable statement on behalf of individualism, as well as man's right to oppose and dissent. In the frame of Thoreau's life, however, it reveals the arbitrary nature of his philosophy. His defense of John Brown, with his espousal of violence in that instance, is hardly the voice of the same man. In both lectures, to be sure, Thoreau condemns government; but the preacher of nonviolence suddenly forgets his preachings. Brown had been wantonly destructive; he had staged a brutal massacre in Kansas and killed innocents. He was a man whose fanaticism might have made him in other circumstances a brutal Inquisitor. Thoreau's involvement in his cause has in it 38

Henry D. Thoreau strong elements of hysteria. The passive countenance closes its eyes to truth; it sees only Brown's cause and Brown's hatred of authority. It does not see his cruelty or his counter-imposition of authority. The world has wisely chosen to remember "Civil Disobedience" rather than the three John Brown lectures — "A Plea for Captain Brown," "The Last Days of John Brown," and "After the Death of John Brown." Whether the personal anarchism Thoreau preached is possible in every age remains to be seen. In his philosophy Thoreau saw only his own dissent; he seems not to have thought of the dangers of tyranny by a minority, as of a majority. As we survey the volumes of Thoreau's writings, the two completed books, the miscellaneous essays published posthumously, the poems and letters, what looms largest are the fourteen volumes of Thoreau's journals (1906) to which another volume was added in recent times on discovery of a lost notebook (1958). The journal was the mirror of his days; but it is not an autobiographical record in the usual sense. It is one of the more impersonal journals of literary history. Thoreau made it the account book of his days. There are notes on his readings, his observations of nature, his record of walks, scraps of talk, observations of neighbors; on occasion the journal becomes a log, a statistical record. He began to keep it when he was twenty and he kept it until his death a quarter of a century later. It tends to be discursive, sprawling, discontinuous. One finds in it much matter-of-factness and little feeling. "The poet must keep himself unstained and aloof," said Thoreau and his journal is distinctly "aloof." One discerns in it a continuing note of melancholy; there is little humor; the vein is always one of high seriousness. Mankind is regarded in the mass; the generalizations are large; there is not much leaning toward the precisions of science. Nor can one find any record of growth in these pages, some of them turgid 39

LEON EDEL

and dull, others lucid and fascinating. From 1837 to 1861 we see the same man writing; he has learned little. If one notes a difference it is that he begins by being philosophical and in the end is more committed to observation. The journal suggests that Thoreau was incapable of a large effort as a writer. He learned to be a master of the short, the familiar essay; he made it lively and humanized it with his whimsicalities. The method of the journal was carried over into his principal works, the journal providing the raw data, filed always for later use. Perry Miller admirably showed how Thoreau labored to convert these data into literary material. The assiduity with which he applied himself to his writing ultimately bore fruit. If Thoreau never forged a style and filled his work with the echoes of other styles, he nevertheless in the end learned his trade. Possessing no marked ego at the beginning of his adult life, he created a composite ego; and he learned to write by using a series of rhetorical tricks. Emerson recognized Thoreau's exaggerated mannerisms when he noted in his journal that "the trick of his rhetoric is soon learned; it consists in substituting for the obvious word and thought its diametrical antagonist. He praises wild mountains and winter forests for their domestic air; snow and ice for their warmth; villagers and woodchoppers for their urbanity, and the wilderness for resembling Rome and Paris." There were times, as in the description of the battle of the ants as if it were the Trojan war, when this trick of exaggeration is markedly successful. But after a while it tends to become tedious and seems like a tic, as Perry Miller remarked. Lowell aptly characterized the style when he said Thoreau turns "commonplaces end for end, and fancies it makes something new of them." He added that Thoreau "had none of the artistic mastery which controls great work to the serene balance of completeness, but exquisite mechanical skill in shaping of sentences and paragraphs." 40

Henry D. Thoreau Lowell, Emerson, and of all writers, Robert Louis Stevenson wrote essays on Thoreau which characterized him more carefully and perceptively than most of his worshippers have since done. But because these were essays which were measured and critical of the man as reflected in his work, they have been dismissed as ungenerous and irrelevant. Indeed Lowell's brilliant essay has been called "infamous," perhaps because its criticism was uncompromising and lacked the urbanity and delicacy of Stevenson's. Lowell was a gregarious man; he met the world as he found it; he could therefore recognize the alienated side of Thoreau and see the profound narcissism of his nature — although he called it by another name. He said of Thoreau that he made "his own whim the law, his own range the horizon of the universe," and noted that he "confounded physical with spiritual remoteness from men." Emerson's judgments were contained in his funeral oration and they are stated with considerable subtlety. We have but to ponder a remark such as that Thoreau "chose wisely, no doubt, for himself, to be the bachelor of thought and nature" to recognize that Emerson is defining what was most absent from Thoreau's life — human love, and the give and take an individual must learn in his human relatedness. Stevenson noted the absence of "geniality" in Thoreau, "the smile was not broad enough," and like Emerson he spoke of Thoreau's failure to allow himself "the rubs and trials of human society." In a sentence of considerable point for our time, Stevenson equated drug taking with this kind of alienation. "A man who must separate himself from his neighbor's habits in order to be happy, is in much the same case with one who requires to take opium for the same purpose." Perhaps the best known part of Stevenson's essay was his characterization of Thoreau's views of friendship. He "does not give way to love any more than to hatred," wrote Stevenson, "but preserves them both with care, like valuable curiosities. A more bald-headed picture of life, if I may so express myself, or a 41

LEON EDEL

more selfish, has seldom been presented . . . Thoreau is dry, priggish and selfish. It is profit he is after in these intimacies; moral profit, certainly, but still profit to himself. If you will be the sort of friend I want, he remarks naively, 'my education cannot dispense with your society.' His education! as though a friend were a dictionary. And with all this, not a word about pleasure, or laughter, or kisses, or any quality of the flesh and blood. It was not inappropriate, surely, that he had such close relations with the fish." Emerson spoke with great candor of Thoreau's aggressivity: "There was something military in his nature not to be subdued, always manly and able, but rarely tender, as if he did not feel himself except in opposition. He wanted a fallacy to expose, a blunder to pillory, I may say he required a little sense of victory, a roll of the drum, to call his powers into full exercise. It cost him nothing to say No; indeed he found it much easier than to say Yes. It seemed as if his first instinct on hearing a proposition was to controvert it, so impatient was he of the limitations of our daily thought. This habit, of course, is a little chilling to the social affections; and though the companion would in the end acquit him of any malice or untruth, yet it mars conversation. Hence, no equal companion stood in affectionate relations with one so pure and guileless. 'I love Henry,' said one of his friends, 'but I cannot like him; and as for taking his arm, I should as soon think of taking the arm of an elmtree.' " Men will continue to discover these strange ambiguities in the author of Walden. If we are to dress a literary portrait of him, we must place him among those writers in whom the human will is organized to a fine pitch in the interest of mental and emotional survival. We must rank him with the "disinherited" and the alienated, with the writers who find themselves possessed of unconquerable demons and who then harness them in the service of self-preservation. Out of this quest sometimes mere eccentricity emerges; at 42

Henry D. Thoreau other times art. There are distinct pathological traits in Thoreau, a constant sense — a few have discerned it — of inner disintegration which leads Thoreau in his Walden imagery to a terrible vision of human decay. One may venture a guess that this little observed Poesque streak in Thoreau testified to a crisis of identity so fundamental that Thoreau rescued himself only by an almost superhuman self-organization to keep himself, as it were, from falling apart. In doing this he clung obsessively to nature. A much deeper history of Thoreau's psyche may have to be written to explain his tenuous hold on existence in spite of the vigor of his outdoor Life: his own quiet desperation, his endless need to keep a journal ("as if he had no moment to waste," said his friend Charming), and his early death of tuberculosis at forty-five in Concord during the spring of 1862. His works were the anchor of his days. He overcame dissolution during his abbreviated life by a constant struggle to assert himself in words. Some such strivings shaped his own recognition of his "crooked genius." His brief journeys and his writings about them enabled others after his death to put together the volumes published as Excursions (1863), The Maine Woods (\ 864), Cape Cod (1865), and A Yankee in Canada (1866). He had, as he said, "travelled a good deal in Concord"; and it is in that setting that his myth is best recognized and best understood.

43

Selected Bibliography Works of Henry D. Thoreau SEPARATE WORKS PUBLISHED DURING THOREAU's LIFETIME

A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Boston and Cambridge: James Munroe, 1849. Walden; or, Life in the Woods. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1854. POSTHUMOUS SELECTED PROSE COLLECTIONS

Excursions. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1863. The Maine Woods. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1864. Cape Cod. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1865. A Yankee in Canada, ivith Anti-Slavery and Reform Papers. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1866. Early Spring in Massachusetts. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1881. Summer: From the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau. Boston: Houghton MifHin, 1884. Winter: From the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1888. Autumn: From the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1892. Miscellanies. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1894. The Service. Boston: Charles E. Goodspeed, 1902. Sir Walter Raleigh. Boston: Bibliophile Society, 1905. POETRY

Poems of Nature, edited by Henry S. Salt. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1895. Collected Poems, edited by Carl Bode. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1964. JOURNAL

Journal, edited by Bradford Torrey. 14 vols. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906. Journal, edited by Bradford Torrey and Francis H. Allen. 14 vols. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949. Consciousness in Concord (lost volume of the Journal), edited by Perry Miller. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958.

44

Selected Bibliography COLLECTED EDITIONS

The Writings of Henry David Thoreau. Riverside Edition. 10 vols. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1894 [ 1893 ]. The Writings of Henry David Thoreau. Manuscript and Walden editions. 20 volumes. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906. LETTERS

Letters to Various Persons. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1865. Familiar Letters of Henry David Thoreau, edited by F. B. Sanborn. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1894. Correspondence, edited by Walter Harding and Carl Bode. New York: New York University Press, 1958. CURRENT AMERICAN REPRINTS

Cape Cod. New York: Apollo (Crowell-Dodd-Morrow). $1.95. New Haven, Conn.: College and University Press. $2.25. Collected Poems of Henry Thoreau. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press. $2.45. The Concord and the Merrimack. New York: College and University Press. $2.25. Excursions. New York: Corinth (Citadel). $1.75. H. D. Thoreau: A Writer's Journal. New York: Dover. $2.25. Heart of Thoreau's Journals. New York: Dover. $1.95. Maine Woods. New York: Apollo. $2.25. New York: College and University Press. $2.25. Portable Thoreau. New York: Viking. $1.85. Selected Journals of Henry David Thoreau. New York: Signet (New American Library). $.75. Selected Writings of Henry David Thoreau. New York: Appleton. $.50. Thoreau: People, Principles and Politics. New York: American Century (Hill and Wang). $1.75. The Variorum Walden and the Variorum Civil Disobedience. New York: Washington Square Press. $.60. Walden. New York: Washington Square Press. $.50. New York: Apollo. $2.25. New York: College and University Press. $2.25. New York: Dolphin (Doubleday). $.95. Walden and Civil Disobedience. New York: Airmont. $.50. New York: Perennial Library (Harper and Row). $.50. Boston: Riverside Editions (Houghton Mifflin). $.85. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. $1.25. New York: Collier (Macmillan). $.65. New York: Norton. $1.95. New York: Signet. $.50.

45

LEON EDEL Walden and Other Writings. New York: Bantam. $.95. New York: Modern Library (Random House). $1.25. A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. New York: Apollo. $245. Boston: Sentry Editions (Houghton Mifflin). $1.95. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. $1.50. New York: Signet. $.75.

Bibliographies Since 1941 there has been a continuing bibliography in the quarterly of the Thoreau Society, Thoreau Society Bulletin (Geneseo, New York). Allen, Francis H. A Bibliography of Henry David Thoreau. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1008. Burnham, Philip E., and Carvel Collins. "Contributions to a Bibliography of Thoreau, 1938-1945," Bulletin of Bibliography, 19:16-18, 37-40 (1946). Harding, Walter. A Centennial Check-List of the Editions of Henry David Thoreau's "Walden" Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1954. Spiller, Robert E., et al. Literary History of the United States, vol. 3. New York: Macmillan, 1948. Stovall, Floyd, ed. Eight American Authors: A Review of Research and Criticism. New York: Modern Language Association, 1956. Wade, J. S. "A Contribution to a Bibliography from 1909 to 1936," Journal of the New York Entomological Society, 47:163-203 (1939). White, William. A Henry David Thoreau Bibliography, 1908-193*1. Boston: F. W. Faxon, 1939.

Biographical Studies Atkinson, Brooks. Henry Thoreau: The Cosmic Yankee. New York: Knopf, 1927. Bazalgette, Leon. Henry Thoreau: Bachelor of Nature, translated by Van Wyck Brooks. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1924. Brooks, Van Wyck. The Flowering of New England. Rev. ed. New York: Dutton, 1940. Pp. 286-302,359-73. Canby, Henry S. Thoreau. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1939. Channing, William Ellery. Thoreau, the Poet-Naturalist. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1873. Emerson, E. W., and W. E. Forbes, editors. Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson. 10 vols. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1900-14. Harding, Walter. The Days of Henry Thoreau. New York: Knopf, 1966. Krutch, Joseph Wood. Thoreau. New York: William Sloane Associates, 1948. 46

Selected Bibliography Rusk, Ralph L. The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson. 6 vols. New York: Columbia University Press, 1939. Salt, Henry S. The Life of Henry David Thoreau. London: R. Bentley, 1890; revised, London: W. Scott, 1896. Sanborn, F. B. The Life of Henry David Thoreau. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1882. Seybold, Ethel. Thoreau: The Quest and the Classics. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1951. Shanley, James Lyndon. The Making of Walden. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957. Whicher, George F. Walden Revisited. Chicago: Packard, 1945.

Critical Studies Anderson, Charles R. The Magic Circle of Walden. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968. Cook, Reginald L. Passage to Walden. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949. Harding, Walter. A Thoreau Handbook. New York: New York University Press, 1959. , editor. Thoreau: A Century of Criticism. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1954. (Contains among other essays Emerson's tribute and the essays by Lowell and Stevenson.) Matthiessen, F. O. American Renaissance. New York: Oxford University Press, 1941. Meltzer, Milton, and Walter Harding. A Thoreau Profile. New York: Crowell, 1962. Paul, Sherman. The Shores of America: Thoreau's Inward Exploration. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1958. Stoller, Leo. After Walden: Thoreau's Changing Views on Economic Man. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1957. Torrey, Bradford. Friends on the Shelf. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906.

47